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Dragon Age 2 Review for PC

Dragon Age 2 Review for PC

The Champion, Indeed

The original Dragon Age released in a gaming market that, in hindsight, was incredibly apt for its arrival. There hadn’t been any epic console games released in years. The other games of its ilk were lackluster at best, and their titles were synonymous with mediocrity. Therefore, despite its many flaws, Dragon Age: Origins sold well and was critically well-received.

The sequel doesn’t have that luxury. In part this is because it’s releasing so close to its own predecessor. Just twelve months have passed since the expansion pack to Origins (Dragon Age: Origins Awakening) was released, and thus it’s essentially its own competition. There was also the recent improvement in the Two Worlds franchise and 2010’s Divinity 2: Ego Draconis. With the competition, it’s harder to let Dragon Age 2’s faults slide. The bar has been raised.

Dragon Age 2 Screenshot

The first thing Dragon Age fans will notice is the improved combat system. Bioware has gone to great lengths to make the system more accessible to new players rather than stalwartly focusing on RPG-buffs. Dragon Age 2 marks perhaps the first major enhancement to the Bioware style of turn-based combat since 2005’s Jade Empire (a game with which Dragon Age 2 shares more than a couple similarities).

For all intents and purposes, this is still the same combat system you know and love (or hate) from the last game, but it’s been sped up so you may never even notice that it’s technically turn-based. The behind-the-scenes dice rolls and Dungeons-and-Dragons mechanics are so well hidden that you might think this was an action game. That is a high compliment for a game of this type. Very few epic RPGs have even had the resources and will to craft an engaging battle system.

Dragon Age 2 Screenshot

The fighting system doesn’t seem to have suffered at all from the abbreviated development time. However, the same can’t really be said about the storyline and characters. What starts off as a grand adventure with characters speaking in hushed voices about the mythical “Champion” (read: the player) quickly devolves, growing boring in a hurry. Bioware used an experimental type of storytelling in Dragon Age 2. In all of their other games, you control the main character every step of their journey. In Dragon Age 2, the story skips around from focal point to focal point. Near the beginning of the game, there’s a chance that you’ll need to join up with some foul people in order to get inside of a city.

Their terms dictate that you must work for them for a full year once they get you inside. Rather than making you sludge through a year of busy work, the story skips forward to a scene with characters essentially saying “phew, that was a rough year.” It sounds great in theory, however I’m not convinced that it’s successful. Immersion is a fragile thing, and in this case I think that having control of the character yanked away from you (then subsequently having them live by themselves for a year) breaks your connection with the character.

Dragon Age 2 Screenshot

However, the connections aren’t all that strong to begin with. The new characters aren’t engaging, paling in comparison to the companions from Bioware’s two previous games, Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins. I definitely liked a few characters from Dragon Age 2, particularly Aveline and Anders, but the complex tapestry of personalities from Dragon Age: Origins just isn’t really there anymore. The collective just gets along a bit too well. I really missed Morrigan, Leliana, and Alistair trading quips back and forth throughout the journey. Obviously, we can’t know for sure, but this seems like another casualty of the extremely short development time. It’s hard to imagine how they managed to create any RPG at all in eighteen months, let alone one of considerable overall quality like this one.

The problem with Dragon Age 2 isn’t that it’s a bad game. It’s that just about everything (besides combat) that has changed from the original has changed for the worse. I was excited about the new style of storytelling, but it falls flat. I don’t think that’s Bioware’s fault. I think they just took a risk on something that sounded good on paper, but didn’t quite pan out in reality.

Dragon Age 2 Screenshot

Some problems from Origins have persisted in this game as well. Most notably, the level design is exceedingly poor. Nearly every level consists of narrow pathways that allow for positively zero exploration or player agency. The environments aren’t very good looking to begin with, so there’s not a whole lot of incentive to explore anyway. This problem becomes worse when the storytellers don’t take the time to actually explain where things are. The next leg of a quest is rarely explained to you and now just appears as a blip on the mini-map. This leads to huge swaths of the game being essentially played not with high-res modern graphics, but by watching a few blips go across a 2D mini-map until the cutscene triggers. This, again, is consistent with a game that simply wasn’t taken slowly and carefully.

Thus far, this review has been pretty much a laundry list of complaints, and perhaps that’s misleading. Dragon Age 2 has a lot of problems, and many of them are new to the series which makes them worth talking about in a review. However, the game is still based on one of the best fantasy RPG structures ever built. Even a huge list of complaints can’t drag it down too far. No matter what happens, it’s still fun to fight darkspawn, converse with fun characters, try to seduce your party members, and do all of the other great things that Bioware games have brought us.

There are even a couple areas in which the game feels better than the original. The controls, for instance, feel much more natural on a controller this time around. Whereas Dragon Age: Origins felt shoe-horned onto consoles, this game definitely feels as though it was designed from the ground up for consoles. The other improved area is that graphics. It’s not a big improvement, but the new style lent a refreshingly new feel to the series. Bioware continues to show us new fantasy style that we’ve never seen before.

This is a solid game, but it’s a step backward for Dragon Age and Bioware alike. The question we all need to ask ourselves is whether we’d rather Bioware spend years (seven, by some accounts) working on an epic like Dragon Age: Origins, or if we’d rather they pump out markedly more flawed editions every eighteen to twenty-four months. I really don’t know the answer.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 4.0 Graphics
The new graphics system is pretty good, but not much better or worse than the original. It’s a bit more stylized, and somewhat more unique. 4.2 Control
An improvement over the original. Dragon Age 2 now feels more at home on a console controller. 4.0 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
Lacks the well-known intro song that Dragon Age fans will remember, but remains quite good overall. 4.0 Play Value
Dragon Age 2 is a long, epic adventure that will give you your money’s worth. It’s just that some of the execution didn’t feel spot-on. The story needed work, and the characters sometimes felt flat. 4.0 Overall Rating – Great
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.

Review Rating Legend
0.1 – 1.9 = Avoid 2.5 – 2.9 = Average 3.5 – 3.9 = Good 4.5 – 4.9 = Must Buy
2.0 – 2.4 = Poor 3.0 – 3.4 = Fair 4.0 – 4.4 = Great 5.0 = The Best

Game Features:

  • Embark upon an all-new adventure that takes place across an entire decade and shapes itself around every decision you make.
  • Determine your rise to power from a destitute refugee to the revered champion of the land.
  • Think like a general and fight like a Spartan with dynamic new combat mechanics that put you right in the heart of battle whether you are a mage, rogue, or warrior.
  • Go deeper into the world of Dragon Age with an entirely new cinematic experience that grabs hold of you from the beginning and never lets go.
  • Discover a whole realm rendered in stunning detail with updated graphics and a new visual style.

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